


Left Behind

by mbaline



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Electrocution, HYDRA Trash Party, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Protective Tony Stark, Rape/Non-con Elements, Serious Injuries, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-25
Updated: 2016-08-26
Packaged: 2018-08-10 23:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7865485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mbaline/pseuds/mbaline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Please," Steve had said through the bars of his cell: the first words he'd spoken to Tony since this whole clusterfuck began, which was, huh, three whole months ago now. </p><p>"You don't," Steve had stopped, taken a steadying breath, continued: "You don't know what they might be doing to him."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt,](http://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/1801.html?thread=4347913#cmt4347913) based on the premise that Steve and Bucky don't manage to get away during the airport fight, and all of Team Cap get captured. Steve and the rest get taken to the Raft. Bucky is taken somewhere else.

"Please," Steve had said through the bars on his cell: the first words he'd spoken to Tony since this whole clusterfuck began, which was, huh, three whole months ago now. "You don't," Steve had stopped, taken a steadying breath, continued: "You don't know what they might be doing to him."

Tony had turned away – it figured that Steve's first words had been about Barnes, damn him – ignoring the dull ache of pain at the feel of the eyes of his team – former team – tracking him as he left the Raft's central block without looking back.

And yet something about Steve's words had stayed with him, rattling around in his head like a bolt had come loose. Now here he was, five hours and seven--eight? he'd lost count--tequilas later, in one of the smaller labs of Stark Tower, trying to track Barnes down.

After he'd been captured in Berlin alongside the rest of what the Internet was calling 'Team Cap', Ross had had Barnes separated from the others and transferred to a high-security facility where he would be unable to hurt anyone else and any intel on what he knew about HYDRA's operations could be extracted.

At least, that was what Tony had been told. After Zemo--who'd since vanished in the wind--had dropped the grainy, 144p bombshell that the Winter Soldier had murdered Maria and Howard Stark in cold blood, Tony hadn't trusted himself not to return the favour if he and Barnes were ever face-to-face again, and besides, he'd been a little bit distracted by the fact that his best friend's spine had been partially shattered and would mostly likely leave him permanently paralysed, on top of trying to un-fuck the clusterfuck that had badly damaged two government buildings and an airport, set Ross and the UN on the anti-super warpath, and left the Avengers down four members. 

And so Tony would've been perfectly content to continue keeping Barnes out of sight and out mind---if not for the fact that according to the surveillance footage contained within Ross's files (that Tony had kindly helped himself to; better to ask for forgiveness than for permission), Barnes was being held in a facility on the East coast. Yet according to FRIDAY's scans, not only was that facility sans the Winter Soldier, it was entirely devoid of anyone at all. Hm.

It took a few more hours of digging--and some legally questionable access to some legally questionable files--to track Barnes' location to a pair of coordinates seemingly in the middle of nowhere on the West Coast; whatever the base was, it wasn't in the files. By the time FRIDAY had found a way in, Tony almost felt sober. 

"What's the deal with this place?" he asked, gesturing at the HUD panel beamed above the table in front of him. 

"It's small," FRIDAY answered. "Only a dozen personnel. Barnes is on the lower level." A 3D map of the base appeared on the hologram in front of Tony, zooming in to focus on the room where Barnes was being held. "No surveillance on the inside, but the men have earpieces." 

"Can you pick up their feeds?" 

"Working on it. You thinking what I'm thinking?" 

Tony shrugged. "Let's test it out." 

The thing in question was a program he'd been tinkering around with for the last few months, at least until the events in Romania and everything that happened thereafter. Using multiple audio feeds streamed from the same location, the program was able to reconstruct a visual image--albeit basic--of what was happening, in place of a missing video feed. It hadn't been taken further than the early testing stages before Tony'd had bigger things to put his mind to. 

“FRIDAY, you got that audio?” he asked, after a few more minutes of radio-silence. 

There was a long pause, far longer than it usually took FRIDAY to respond. 

When she finally did, her voice had an oddly brittle edge to it; she sounded shaken.

“Tony,” she began, uncharacteristically hesitant, “I don’t think--”

Tony waved her off; he’d already prepared himself for the possibility of Barnes being subjected to what could, by certain definitions, be considered torture. After a few seconds of silence, he heard a quiet click in his ear followed by a burst of static as FRIDAY began transmitting the feed. 

“---would they think of you, if they saw you like this,” a man was saying. His voice was clear and calm, the words interspersed with some indecipherable rhythmic background noise that sounded vaguely familiar in a way that Tony couldn’t place. Tony flicked his fingers, signalling for FRIDAY to begin analyzing the audio for visual reconstruction. 

A different man spoke next. “We read the notebooks. They used to do this to you. You used to like it.” The underlying noise stopped, replaced by the faint scrape against concrete as someone - more than one person - shifted against the floor, the noise sounding oddly wet. “Clearly you still do.” 

The rhythmic noise resumed, followed by a choked inhale, sounding oddly muffled in comparison to the clarity of the other voices. The sudden sound of a scuffle drowned out the background noise, cut short by what sounded like the crack of metal striking flesh, which was repeated twice more. Someone breathed raggedly and then fell silent. 

"FRIDAY, progress?" Tony murmured in the quiet that followed, glancing at the progress bar in the HUD’s bottom left corner; he'd underestimated how difficult it would be to tell what was happening without visuals.

"67 percent," FRIDAY responded. "Another thirty seconds and I'll have it." 

Tony opened his mouth to reply, stopping short as a new sound came through the line: the sharp crackle of electricity. A stun baton, maybe. 

“Thought we’d been over this," said yet another voice. "Fighting us only makes it worse for your friends."

In retaliation someone must have brushed the edge of the baton over Barnes' skin, judging by the resulting ragged half-groan and the sharp crack of flesh hitting concrete as Barnes flinched away; Tony was beginning to be able to picture it now. 

In the following quiet the buzz of electricity grew louder, took on a harsher edge. It sounded---Tony knew that noise. He'd heard it a hundred times over, in the hours spent with Rhodey in the labs developing something new for War Machine. _Something hand-held,_ they'd both agreed. _Powerful enough to take down a super. Non-lethal. No permanent damage._ They'd gone through dozens of prototypes adjusting the power levels to fit that last criteria. This sounded a lot closer to the early models than the final product.

Through the roar of blood in his ears Tony felt the next quiet words washing over him in slow, sickening waves. 

"Next time it won’t just be Wilson’s face. And Cap would be an interesting challenge, I’m sure. Or maybe we’ll go for Barton - he has a family, you know: wife, kids - or the little Maximoff girl. They’ve got her so drugged up she wouldn’t even resist--”

The man’s voice disintegrated into a yell of pain and the sound of a commotion as the rest of the men fought to subdue Barnes. 

“Motherfucker bit me,” the man snarled a few minutes later, once Barnes had been made still again. 

For a few moments the only noise Tony heard over the rapid pounding of his own heartbeat was the fierce crackle of the baton as it was flicked to its highest setting. 

Two things happened in the following instant: Barnes started screaming, a raw, inhuman sound that went on and on and on, endless in its agony; and the result of FRIDAY's analysis flickered into life before Tony's eyes, showing the scene with brutal, devastating clarity. 

There were eight shapeless-featured men in the room: two at the walls, three standing over Barnes' thrashing figure where he lay restrained on his front, his remaining arm--his left was missing--cuffed behind his back to his waist and his head covered by some kind of hood.The remaining three men were crouched down behind Barnes, two of them pinning down the ends of something that was keeping his legs in place while the third knelt between them, his arm pumping as he moved the baton, pressing it against; no, _into---_

Tony stood, the motion of his fingers automatic: within seconds the suit was growing from his wrist and ankles, encasing him. Even in miniature on the HUD inside his helmet, the image was impossible to look away from: this wasn't torture. This was something else entirely. 

With growing horror Tony tore his eyes away, powering up the suit and taking flight. Without prompting, FRIDAY displayed the base's co-ordinates, along with a breakdown of the best options for an aerial entrance. Neither of them spoke.

The thirty-six minutes that followed felt like the longest of Tony's life. Barnes stopped screaming after four. 


	2. Chapter 2

Tony crashed through the hallway ceiling right in front of the cell door, watching via infrared as the men inside reacted to the noise. In an instant FRIDAY had locked onto their heat signatures. Tony fired, the targeted tranquilizers punching through the wall and door and dropping the men like flies. Tony spared them no attention - that would come later - and blasted open the door. 

He stepped into the room, and froze. 

The first face-to-face impression Tony had had of the Winter Soldier had been the sheer size of him; the footage from the fight on the bridge in DC the day before the helicarriers came down did little to capture exactly what it was like having that imposing figure walk steadily towards him, eyes devoid of emotion, strength and violence clear in every line of his body. Tony remembered the shocking pain of being slammed to the ground in Berlin, remembered the terrifying inhuman power of the metal arm, remembered how Barnes had been relentless, powering through the others' attacks like a human battering ram. Then, Barnes had been huge, unstoppable, unshakable. 

The man now lying half-curled and naked among the prone bodies of his torturers was disturbingly thin, ribs clearly visible beneath the grime of old and new blood and bruises, the knobs of his spine pressing against the thin skin of his curved back. Almost impossible to believe that it was Barnes at all, if not for the twisted mess of metal that was his left arm, ending raggedly at the upper arm where it had been severed. That hadn't happened during the airport fight; someone had done that to Barnes between then and now. Tony didn't want to know whether the arm was wired into the nervous system. He thought back to the sounds Barnes had made when the stun baton was pressed to the exposed wiring, and knew the answer to that question. 

Up until that moment, Tony hadn't fully believed that what he'd heard and seen had been real, had been inflicted on a real human being, regardless of their crimes. The audio analysis was a basic tool, all things considered: useful in the absence of visual information, but incapable of capturing details. Incapable of preparing Tony for the scene laid out before him, for FRIDAY's voice, quiet in his ear, relaying the extent of damage visible through her scans, for the stink of piss and blood and burnt flesh filtering through the protective layer of the suit as he lifted his faceplate and crouched down behind Barnes, for the way Barnes’ throat worked but no sound came out as Tony reached for the baton and, following FRIDAY's directions, carefully, carefully eased it out of Barnes’ body. The noise it made as it slid free was obscene, the metal slick with blood and what looked like---like---come. Jesus fucking Christ.

Tony swallowed down bile, letting the baton clatter to the floor, trying not to look at the mess between Barnes’ thighs or the thing they’d attached to his knees to force his legs apart. Instead his eyes grazed over the seemingly endless horrorshow of Barnes’ skin: boot-shaped bruises everywhere, deep gashes all over, raw burns marking up his back and thighs and feet. His right shoulder was nearly black with bruising, the joint swollen and out-of-socket; dislocated, if not broken, the skin at his cuffed wrist shredded from the force of his struggles. Impossible not to see the horrifying brutality of what had been done to him. Impossible, too, not to see the added violation: come smeared on Barnes’ thighs, his back, staining the hood covering his head. 

Moving across the room to kneel in front of Barnes, Tony reached for the cloth over Barnes’ head. He paused midway to identify himself, in case Barnes hadn't been able to tell from the sound of the blasters and the heavy footfalls of the suit. 

“Hey,” Tony tried. “Hey, Barnes, it’s Tony. Stark. I’m here to---I’m gonna get you out of here.”

Barnes didn’t respond, didn’t give any indication that he’d heard, the fabric over his mouth fluttering silently with every ragged breath. The HUD had showed that he was still conscious, if only just; silence could mean a lot of things: shock, injury, vocal chord damage--he’d sure screamed enough for that--possibly brain damage. Barnes’ skin was a roadmap of the kind of devastation a baton like that could inflict on the surface. Tony'd watched as they alternated between shocking him both inside and out; there was no telling what kind of damage it could inflict when inside someone like that. Jesus, what if he was completely fried? 

“I’m gonna get this hood off, okay?”

Barnes still didn't react, unmoving as Tony carefully removed the hood. The characteristic long hair was missing. It looked as if it had been hacked away with a blunt blade, judging by the amount of dried blood and half-healed cuts littering Barnes' scalp. Barnes' eyes were resolutely fixed on the ground, not meeting Tony's gaze. 

Tony debated what to say and settled for listing his plan of action.

"I'm going to free your hand and your legs, find you something to wear, and then we're getting out of here and getting you somewhere safe, okay?" 

Using a laser on the suit's fingertip, Tony sliced apart both the wrist cuff and the belt it was attached to. As his wrist came free and his ruined shoulder shifted, Barnes made a low, animal noise of pain and convulsed, vomiting a thin stream of blood and--Christ--what looked like come. A few more heaves brought up some more blood--and other fluid that Tony didn't want to think about-- and then nothing at all. Barnes slumped down face-first in the pool of red he'd made, body shaking all over, his chest heaving unevenly as he drooled blood onto the cold concrete floor. 

Tony finished cutting away the bar between Barnes's knees and quickly moved to Barnes' head to make sure he wasn't about to choke. He tore off a clean piece of fabric from the clothes of one of the unconscious men--feeling grim satisfaction at the sight of the mouth-sized hole in the blood-stained lower leg of the man's pants-- and, after a moment's hesitation, carefully cupped Barnes’ chin and wiped his bloody mouth and nose clean as gently as he could. This close it was clear just how tenuously Barnes was clinging to consciousness; his breathing had subsided into a rasping wheeze and his skin registered as shockingly cold through the sensors in Tony's fingertips. Ideally, Barnes’ vitals would have stabilized a little bit more ahead of flying him out of there, but time was running out; according to FRIDAY they had less than two minutes until the base’s security arrived. 

Extracting the suit's rescue kit containing supplies for emergency rescue situations, Tony removed the expanding mesh blanket and set the size parameters large enough to cover Barnes up. As it prepared itself, he tried to get a response. 

“I’m going to get you covered up with this, and then I’m gonna pick you up, and we’re getting out of here.” When Barnes remained unresponsive he let out a long breath and crouched down until they were eye level. "I didn't know, Barnes," he said quietly. "I didn't know they---that this was happening. You can hate me for it later, but right now I need your help getting out of here. Can you do that for me?" 

The rhythm of Barnes' breathing changed. His gaze flickered from the floor to settle briefly on Tony's face before shifting away again. After a long moment, he nodded. 

"Good," Tony managed to get out past the dull ache in his throat, "okay, here we go," carefully he draped the blanket over Barnes, covering him from shoulder to calf, before helping Barnes to ease himself onto his side until the blanket had firmly secured itself around him, trying not to wince as the fabric settled over raw abraded skin. Barnes didn't make a sound, just let himself be moved and then lifted into Tony's arms--God, he was so light--his head lolling against Tony's shoulder after a few seconds: unconscious at last. 

“Okay,” Tony said, giving the room one last look around: the fresh and dried blood and come smeared and pooled on the floor, the severed restraints Barnes had been kept in, the blood-slick stun-baton, the unconscious men who'd kept Barnes in here and done this to him. There wasn’t time to deal with them now, but if Tony had their faces and identities, had copies of whatever information was stored at this base, evidence of what had taken place here, no-one was going to be getting away unpunished.

"You got everything?" he murmured as the faceplate settled over his eyes. 

"Got it," FRIDAY responded, her voice like steel, the meaning clear: we’re going to fucking destroy these bastards, and then we’re going to come back and burn this place to the ground.

“Okay, let’s do this,” and then he was blasting a hole in the ceiling, and tightening his grip on Barnes, and they were up in the air, they were getting away, they were gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have some ideas for where things might go from here (though nothing concrete), but I have a few WIPs I need to get done first, so I'm marking this complete just in case I don't manage to get back to it. 
> 
> Feedback/comments much appreciated! <3 If you have any suggestions for what you might like to see happen next, I'd love to hear them.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/comments are really appreciated; let me know what you thought!


End file.
